I bought the best PCI video card I could find to try to extend the life of my kid's Pentium Pro 200 (a slower PII with bastard Socket8) for another year or so. The PCI Video boards look like they're 2 year old technology. They do have XP compatibility and direct x 6&7 hardware compatibility, but not Direct X 8.0. Can I play direct X8 games with this card? What effect will downloading XP and direct x software patches have when the video hardware is dead ended at direct x7? Will downloading Direct X8 microsoft bypass the 64M video card hardware solution and bog down my 200 MHz PC? Thanks for any feedback.

Hi Again Lscman Your Graphics card will play most of the new Games and if you are already running Windows XP you already have Directx 8 installed it comes as a part of Windows XP !!! [:)] So I suggest you just click on the link I have put below :- ftp://download1.nvidia.com/Windows/30.82/30.82_winxp.exe And download the latest drivers for your Graphics Card they are 10 Meg so it is quite a big file and that should cure your Problem !!! [:)] I hope this Helps !!!

64Mb - good choice in a PCI card, since you do not have the advanced AGP features to assist with textures in system memory.

Compare drivers! - For a GF2 MX, latest are not always greatest - some say 21.x was the perfornce high for these, others say even lower.

You will NOT be able to use DX8 HARDWARE RELIANT things, but as yet, not crucial - eg. 3dMark 2001 will not show the "Nature" benchmark or the pixel shaders. But the drivers ARE DX8 compatible - we are now in a transition period, where DX8-drivered DX7 hardware (including the current Geforce 4MX) will be common for some time, and only a brave developer would lock themselves out - though some graphics features may be left out in order to keep the speed up.

I believe there is a PCI version of the ATI Radeon 9000 available - a lowish clocked, and somewhat trimmed, but still fully DX8 hardware card.